by Jenny Colgan
She looked around again at the cosy room. Lilian had been born in this cottage. Never married, just focused on the business and stayed in the same village all her life. It seemed so strange.
‘Do you get to London much?’ she asked, knowing it was a stupid question as soon as it came out of her mouth.
‘Well, obviously David Niven telephones me when he’s in town, but apart from that …’ Lilian stopped herself. It wasn’t this girl’s fault she was getting older and everything was packing up, and it was the most irritating, frustrating thing she could possibly imagine to have no bloody hope of getting any better, and seeing this frumpy thing bounce in to look after her. This young woman didn’t have the slightest clue what an incredible luxury it was to hop on a London train whenever it took her fancy, darting hither and thither without a care in the world, and thought Lilian was just a broken toy that must be packed somewhere neatly out of the way.
‘Hmm,’ said Lilian. ‘Are you hungry?’
Rosie wasn’t, really. She’d eaten three enormous and vastly overpriced sandwiches on the train to give herself something to do, apart from staring out of the window and worrying about Gerard. When she came back to London, would he meet her at the railway station and suddenly drop down on one knee and she’d have to pretend to be surprised and make her face look all wide-eyed and appealing? She’d have to remember to put on extra make-up, and everyone around them in the station would smile and maybe even clap, like in a movie or something … Yes. That was definitely what would happen. Then she’d opened her eyes. Gerard didn’t even like getting down on his knees to tie his shoelaces he made old groany noises.
Lilian glanced back towards a door that obviously led to the kitchen. It occurred to Rosie that Lilian might be very hungry; if she wasn’t mobile, it was a bit of a mystery as to how she was feeding herself. The house was very tidy; how did she manage that?
‘You could make tea …’ Lilian said. ‘Only if you want some. It’s easy to find everything.’
Rosie turned to her. There was a lot less hostility in her aunt’s tone.
‘OK,’ said Rosie carefully. ‘Yes, actually, I’m really hungry. While I’m in there, can I rustle you up something?’
‘Oh, hardly anything for me … I eat like a bird,’ said Lilian defensively, willing the girl to hurry up. She was desperate for a cup of tea; her arthritis meant she could no longer lift the kettle.
Rosie stood up and headed into the tiny, immaculate kichen. Ornate old-fashioned tins were lined up on the white surfaces, labelled flour, sugar, tea. Unfortunately they were all empty. Next to the kettle – the old-fashioned kind, which stood on a gas hob – there was a half-empty box of loose tea, a kind of sieve and a flowery teapot covered in a knitted cosy. Rosie stared at it all for a while.
Once she’d figured out how to light the gas, which flared up with a pop, she peered into the kitchen cupboards. They weren’t empty. But what she found surprised her. Instead of bread, pasta and cans of beans, there were packets and packets of sweets. Rainbow stars and jelly fish and cola bottles and Black Jacks; Minstrels and Maltesers, Highland Toffee and great slabs of Fry’s Chocolate Cream; soft little flying sauces and jelly flumps; twists of rhubarb and custards; Wham Bars and chocolate eclairs and wrappers Rosie couldn’t even identify. She opened up drawer after drawer, but it was the same story everywhere: jelly tots and jelly beans, lemon sherbets and fizz bombs, bubble gum and Parma violets.
No wonder her great-aunt’s bones weren’t healing well, Rosie realised. This stuff was pure poison. But if it was too hard for her to lift a pan; too difficult to cook every day … She went back into the sitting room to announce that, starting tomorrow, she would do a shop and cook for them both, only to find her aunt snoring tiny baby snores, head nodding on to her chest, in front of the dying fire.
‘Lilian,’ she said, quietly at first, then more loudly. She suspected Lilian’s claims of not being deaf in the slightest were probably a little overstated, and she was used to working with the elderly. ‘Lilian. Lilian. Come on. Let’s get you to bed. We’ll eat better in the morning.’
Leaning heavily on Rosie – she weighed about as much as a child – Lilian let herself be led into the neat, small bedroom at the back of the house. Once there, she pretended to be half asleep, and Rosie let her professional nursing training take over, as she efficiently found a nightgown and helped the old woman change and toilet. Pretending to be asleep meant Rosie didn’t get a thank you, but she decided on balance it might be best for both of them if it stayed that way. She looked at the tightly tucked white bedspread. It didn’t look like it had been pulled back for a while. There was nothing else for it. Carefully, Rosie bent down – bending from the knees, not the back, as her nurse manager must have yelled at her a million times – picked up the old lady and tucked her into bed, as cosy as a child. She placed the tea on the side table, mixed with cold water in case of scalding.
Something came out of Lilian’s mouth that might have been a thank you, or just a sigh of relief, but the comfort and happiness of lying down in her own bed for the first time in weeks was simply too much: Lilian was overtaken, almost immediately, by the first good sleep she’d had in a long time.
Rosie came back to the sitting room and looked around, counting the doors, and wondered where she was to go. Surely she wasn’t going to have to sleep in front of the fire in that tiny sitting room? Suddenly, even with the kettle cheerily whistling in the kitchen, she felt mind-achingly tired. She checked her phone; there was almost no signal here, and she had no messages. She texted Gerard quickly to say good night, but the message took a long time to get through and he didn’t reply. He was probably at the pub with his mates. She would have liked to say good night to him.
Opening random cupboard doors, she found, finally, a pull-out wooden ladder, fixed to a trapdoor above. Was there something else up there? Surely Lilian would have mentioned it if she didn’t have a spare bed?
The fire was dying down behind her and the dim lights made it hard to see her way. Rosie gave up looking for a light switch and tentatively felt her way up the ladder. At the top, the trapdoor opened into a space so dark she couldn’t see a thing, except a dormer window with a clear view of a starry, starry night, and the omnipresent dark shadows of the hills beyond.
Gradually, as her eyes adjusted, she made out the shape of a double bed, just under the lowered eaves. Her whole body relaxed. Sleeping on a sofa would have been a bit much. Nipping down, she extinguished the lights, popped into the loo and hauled her case upstairs, punting it on her shoulders. Unable to find her pyjamas, Rosie just slipped off her trousers and top, snuck under the heavy counterpane and thick, crisp cotton sheets that were, as in Lilian’s room, so tightly tucked in she couldn’t move any more than a swaddled baby, glanced briefly at the moon through the open curtains and, just as she thought she must get up to close those curtains, fell into a deep, deep sleep.
Chapter Four
Nobody is saying there is anything wrong with a Crunchie. The Crunchie is a fine, fine feat of well-balanced confectioner’s engineering and has been for nearly 100 years. Malt balls are another matter, best left between you and the forty-five minutes it will take to scrape the clag off your mouth after you finish a packet, this calorific expenditure presumably leading to their advertising slogan as being slightly less heavy than other brands.
But honeycomb: pure, eaten by itself, that delicate, friable, crumbling pop of sharp yellow sweetness that cuts in the mouth then vanishes, as if by magic, to nothing; the satisfying tearing of the granules without the softness of chocolate getting in the way; an excellent solo honeycomb bar can make you feel like you are eating your way through the rocks of Elysium. And it truly is the lighter way to enjoy … itself.
1942
You could hear the screaming all the way down the street. It sounded like one of Caffrin Stirling’s pigs being slaughtered, but grew nearer all the time. Lilian, in the middle of stocktaking – it was market day in Ashby-de-la-
Zouch and that meant early closing for them – scrambled down the steps wiping dust from her forehead, and charged out into the road.
She was met by a very strange sight: Henry Carr, white as a sheet and with a look of holy terror on his face, was carrying a small girl, who was kicking and screaming as if the devils were after her. Lilian recognised her as little Henrietta, only daughter of the manor house, and breathed in sharply. Everyone else on the road on that quiet Wednesday afternoon, mostly the elderly, stood and stared, but Lilian didn’t think twice.
‘What on earth have you done now, Henry Carr?’ she cried, taking the young girl from his arms.
‘Hush, hush there,’ she said, as the little girl continued to screech and twist her body furiously.
‘There’s no one at that damn doctor’s,’ said Henry, his voice trembling. ‘They’ve all gone to market. She just wandered into my yard, I was working down the end.’
Lilian looked the child over. From her foot protruded the head of a snub-nosed nail. She winced and looked at Henry. They both knew what that meant.
‘Come in, come in,’ she said, and led him through to the back of the shop, where a tiny area had a tap with running water and OMO under the sink.
‘Where was Gerda Skitcherd?’ Lilian asked in a fury. Gerda was the child’s nanny. ‘She’s only a mite.’
‘She was there,’ said Henry, looking shifty all of a sudden. ‘She’s run up to the house to fetch Charlie.’
Lilian ran the tap.
‘Is there a girl in this town that can keep her eyes off you then?’
Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Hetty.
‘Now, little miss,’ she said, trying to sound strong and practical, even though she felt anything but. ‘We have to do something very important. Something you’re going to have to be big and brave for.’
The little girl’s screaming, which had quietened down at the sound of Lilian’s voice, transformed into nervous jerky breaths. Lilian looked at Henry.
‘Can you take her arms?’
Henry looked as though he’d rather cut off one of his own, but he came forward. The little girl flinched as he held her, then, as quickly as she could, Lilian took out the nail and washed the wound out with diluted bleach. The little girl screamed the place down, but Lilian was relentless. Lockjaw haunted the countryside. And neither of them felt like explaining it to the manor.
Finally, the wound glistening red raw, Lilian reckoned they’d done enough, and bound up the foot in a freshly laundered handkerchief. The little girl’s sobs started to lessen and Lilian held her close, arms clasped around her neck. Lilian rather enjoyed the little clawed-monkey hold, the fresh scent of the child’s hair.
‘Are you feeling better?’ she asked gently. She glanced upwards to find Henry, the colour returning to his cheeks, once again looking at her in that peculiar way, and instantly she started to blush too.
‘BETTAH LILYIN,’ said the mite, already perking up enough to eye up the rows and rows of sweetie jars around the walls. From the young lady of the manor to the lowest back-row urchin, there wasn’t a child in town who didn’t know Lilian and Mr Hopkins. Lilian smiled.
‘Would you like to choose a sweetie for being such a brave girl?’
Hetty nodded enthusiastically.
‘She wasn’t brave at all,’ said Henry.
‘And you weren’t watching her. And neither was that Gerda, fluttering her eyelashes at you. They’re stuck on, by the way.’
Henry looked confused.
‘Those eyelashes.’
‘Oh,’ said Henry, as the little girl reached up for a large red lollipop. ‘Really? And aren’t you going to ask her for her coupon?’
‘“Thank you, Miss Hopkins, for helping me with the child” is, I believe, the sentence you were grasping for there, Mr Carr.’
Charlie, the butler from the big house, threw himself round the wooden-framed door, closely followed by a sobbing Gerda. Lilian handed over the bandaged, happy infant, now proudly showing off her lollipop and babbling about her adventure to anyone who would listen, and they watched the party head off.
‘I hope she doesn’t lose her job,’ said Henry.
‘I hope she never looks after your children then,’ said Lilian, then regretted immediately, as so often, the sharpness of her tongue, as Henry looked wounded.
‘You’re not much for the second chances, are you, Miss Hopkins?’ he said, a little sadly.
Lilian swallowed hard, wondering if he was going to ask her to the next dance. Because, sure as eggs were eggs, she was going to say yes this time, and for once she wouldn’t care what the other girls in the village would say. She turned her face towards him, shining and full of expectation, but he had already picked up his cap and was heading for the door.
‘Thank you, Miss Hopkins,’ he said formally, and left Lilian open-mouthed, scouring the sink viciously, thinking that the Gerdas and the Idas of this world had all the fun, while she did all the damned work.
Rosie slept late the next morning and awoke, not to a chiming alarm clock or to buses wheezily groaning to a stop outside her window or, worst of all, to the clattering of bottles being emptied out from the nightclub next door at 4am. This was bad enough when it woke her; worst of all was when she’d been lying awake for so long wondering about the future that she heard the staff carting them out.
But here, the only sound was a faint rustling, and birdsong, a happy twittering somewhere nearby. The room, with its open curtains, was bathed in soft golden light and she sat up to take in her surroundings for the first time. Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she breathed a sigh.
The room was plain and bare, but Rosie rather liked it like that. Whoever had converted it had done a beautiful job. It had a plain whitewashed wooden floor covered in thick patterned rugs, with two walls a pale blue and the other two papered in a tiny blue flower print. Her large, antique sleigh bed had white wooden cabinets on either side, both with candlesticks and white candles. A small wooden door led to a compact white ensuite bathroom, another to a built-in wardrobe, and there was a slightly incongruous baggy pink armchair in the corner of the room.
A dormer window looked over the front of the house. Jumping up and peering through it, Rosie saw it pointed towards a field full of sheep, the green gorse of the hills and, beyond, miles and miles of blue-washed sky. On the other side of the room, above the trapdoor, a single tiny window high in the wall looked over into Lilian’s back garden. It was exquisite, bordered by a picket fence, and neatly laid out, hollyhocks and wisteria predominating. It wasn’t large but it was extremely neat, with gravel paths meandering here and there between high-tied rose bushes and sharply clipped hedges. One corner was laid out with vegetables (Rosie wondered about this; Lilian didn’t seem to be eating any of them); one to herbs and, at the very end, where a small wooden gate led out on to yet another field, there were two huge apple trees growing intertwined to form a bower. Tiptoeing to lean out, Rosie thought she could hear the dreamy buzzing of summer bees.
Rosie had never been anywhere like this before. A garden like this, spilling into open land … well, of course, it just didn’t happen in the city, or certainly not in the parts of it she knew well. She took a deep breath, inhaled the scent of the garden, the dark green gorse smell of the hills, the underlying flavour of the earth. She felt as if something was missing; there was no thrum of traffic and motion and trains rumbling beneath the earth or planes cutting through the sky. Just this peace. Shaking her head, she washed and dressed, feeling, for the first time, a tiny hint of excited curiosity about what the day might bring.
Downstairs there was no sign of her great-aunt. Rosie peeped into the bedroom, but the old lady was fine, just fast asleep. Sleep and good food; what Lilian needed more than anything, Rosie surmised. She could work on the second one.
She crept back upstairs and called her mother.
‘Angie?’
‘Aw yih?’
‘Mum! Stop that, you’re not Australian.�
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‘Darling, I have a natural facility for accents. I just pick them up. Are you there?’
‘Of course I’m here. What did you think, I was going to say I was coming then fly to the US?’
‘No need to be so touchy! Were you always so touchy?’
Rosie took a deep breath and managed to avoid saying anything sarcastic about being plucked out of your life and sent to the back of beyond to babysit a grumpy geriatric because everyone else was too busy having barbecues by the swimming pool and drinking beer from a little bottle and saying yih.
‘Never mind,’ she said.
‘Did Gerard drive you up and settle you in?’ said Angie, in a conciliatory tone which unfortunately failed in its goal.
‘No,’ said Rosie. ‘I got the bus. I didn’t mind,’ she lied.
Angie didn’t say anything for a moment.
‘Well, OK!’ she added finally. ‘Why don’t you go out and explore?’
Rosie had been considering staying in bed till Lilian got up, hiding with her book and enjoying a rare lie-in on her own that wasn’t punctuated by the sound of Gerard playing Grand Theft Auto at ear-shattering volume, but her mum was insistent.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Lipton’s nice, I used to spend a lot of time there as a child. Get your bearings. Introduce yourself.’
Rosie rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not “introducing myself”.’
‘It’s a village, they’ll expect it. They’ll find out who you are anyway, everyone gossips non-stop.’
‘Well, they’ll have nothing to gossip about with me.’
But she decided to follow her mother’s instructions anyway; there wasn’t a sound from downstairs. She wondered, thinking about the tidily made and unused-looking bed, exactly how much sleep Lilian had been getting lately, and figured she’d better leave her to it. Plus, she was absolutely starving and didn’t want to stomp around the tiny doll’s-house kitchen.